Mozilla release manager Christian Legnitto confirmed in the early hours of this morning that there will be just one more beta of Firefox 4 before the upcoming but oft-delayed browser hits Release Candidate status.

"I just wanted to send a quick note clarifying again that Firefox 4 beta 12 is the last planned beta," he said.

"It may be confusing that nightly builds after beta 12 identify themselves as version 2.0b13pre. The versioning is merely a product of automation. This DOES NOT mean we are having a beta 13."

As The Register has previously reported, Mozilla wonks have been mulling a 13th beta of Firefox 4 to help nail the final bugs in the browser before spinning out a Release Candidate build.

The open source outfit had been hoping to kick Firefox 4 out the door by the end of this month, but it looks certain to fall into a March release date now.

One of the show-stopping bugs giving the Mozilla team sleepless nights involved an issue with testers struggling to read their emails via Microsoft's online webmail service, Hotmail.

A freelance Mozilla consultant confirmed on Twitter this morning that he had applied a fix of sorts to that particular bug.

"Firefox was the last major browser not to have site-specific hacks. I just wrote a hostname-triggered workaround just for Hotmail. :-(" Henri Sivonen tweeted on his account.

He explained his method in a Mozilla bug thread here. But Sivonen warned that he would "still very much like Hotmail to deploy their patch, because the old parser is going away after Firefox 4".

As we noted previously, some testers and Mozilla folk have been anxious about the Hotmail bug, which may possibly stall the release of Firefox 4, because the team needs to rely on Redmond's help to fix the glitch. ®